Culture Guides

Mini-guide by Suzie Capelli

Here’s a puzzle for you: Assume Donor A wants to fund development in the area of Z. Donor A raises money and starts a project in Z. Now assume, a few years later Donor B also decides area Z is in line with its short to medium term priorities and unlocks funding for a project.

What will Donor B do?

A. Start a project committee, get government approval and begin work in area Z?

B. Hire a consultant to assess needs, start project Z, run into funding difficulties and decide to implement a scaled down version of project Z, under a larger initiative in the area of Y?

C. Start a dialogue with Donor A, discussing their successes and failures and see if Donor B can use the funds available to improve on Donor A’s existing services in area Z?

Answer: Ok the answer is that it’s a trick question. In fact either A or B could happen, whereas C, almost never happens. Which leads to a simple question – Why?

The answer is that everyone seems to want their own “brand” on a development project. If Donor B were to join Donor A it might be seen as stealing the glory in some sense. Alternatively if there are things which are not quite up to scratch in Donor A’s project, Donor B may feel its time to do things better.

Of course without dialogue, mistakes are likely to be repeated. Perhaps Donor A and Donor B’s approach to development are irreconcilable. Whatever the case unless the government of the country is particularly strong on donor coordination, the people who lose out are the very population the Donors are purportedly trying to help. The effects of donor disorganisation can be severely disruptive when it occurs in humanitarian aid, see point 10 for details.

Even when some efforts are in place to coordinate aid, the developing country government is in a difficult position: After all, when you are dirt poor who wants to reject free money? What would happen, if you gave a street beggar a loaf of bread and he returned it, saying he already had a loaf and could you give him some jam to go with it?

The situations described above tend to happen more with smaller, non-government donors. The large Government to Government donors have cottoned on to the idea of coordination but sometimes seem to exercise a kind of “pre-coordination”.

Even among large donors there are those which can react to a need faster than others. The World Bank and its ilk are notorious for providing large aid budgets which take at least 5 years til implementation. The result is that when you approach one donor to ask for funds for an area, you may be rejected on the grounds that WB has that area covered even though you have an urgent need and know that the funds will not be unlocked for a long time.

Part of the problem is that if you were to find funds for your area, the bigger (slower) donor is not able to react quickly enough to the change in needs. There is somehow a belief that priority areas and needs remain constant over many years. Given that I am in the technology area, and technology changes so fast, we have particular problems with this attitude.

Lastly Third World Governments may feel that over all they stand to loose out from donor coordination and may pay only lip service to enforcing it. Without coordination they can do the government equivalent of “playing the parents against one another”.

There was a story I heard recently where DFID (UK government aid department) offered to subsidise technical training for some civil servants but in order to ensure that the interest was genuine, the recipients were asked to provide a token contribution of about £50.

On the other hand the Cooperation Canadian (Canadian Government Aid agency) was coming up to its year end and had some of its aid budget to spare. Result: They agreed to fund technical training to the tune of £50!

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